WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES
April 22, 2015
NEWS AND EVENTS
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Best of luck
on finals, and
remember…
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Women’s and Gender Studies
LOCAL HAPPENINGS
SWITCH: The Dancing Body of the State
Queer Social Dance, Political Leadership, and Black Popular Culture
21st century popular culture, circulated by media, enables unusual affiliations of
bodies in motion. When black social dances are practiced by American political
leaders, as when First Lady Michelle Obama demonstrates “the Dougie” in her
“Let’s Move” anti-obesity campaign, or when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton dances alongside others during her 2012 tour of Africa, black social dance
moves toward a center of considerations of embodied knowledge.
This talk wonders at the intertwining of African American social dances and
political leadership, conceived as the bodies of elected officials. In addition we
will consider the commercial and socially-inscribed leaders of popular cultural,
including Beyonce and Brittany Spears, as arbiters of African American social
dance. Ultimately, the talk suggests a haunting presence of queers-of-color
aesthetic imperatives within political mobilizations of black social dance,
continually - and ironically - conceived as part and parcel of rhetorics of liberation
and freedom of movement. As queer dances emerge in marginalized relationship
to mainstream concerns of identity and gesture, and then migrate toward shifting
centers of popular culture, they shimmer and switch, bringing to light – perhaps possibilities of creative aesthetic social dissent.
Thomas F. DeFrantz
Thursday, April 23, 2015
5:00pm in 4-231
MIT CAMPUS
gsl-events@mit.edu • mitgsl.mit.edu
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Thomas F. DeFrantz is Chair of African and African American Studies at Duke University. He taught at MIT for many years, in Music and Theater
Arts and Comparative Media Studies.
Women’s and Gender Studies
BC and LOCAL HAPPENINGS
#EmbraceYourSpace
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A social media initiative led by five
Boston College women who aim to
address and bring awareness to the
ways in which people’s spaces are
constricted or violated physically,
verbally, and mentally in a
patriarchal society.
The #EmbraceYourSpace team plans
to draw attention to everyday
situations, especially those witnessed
at Boston College, such as
unwelcome touching at parties,
verbal sexual harassment, and maledominated areas such as the big
weight section of the Plex. Support
the initiative by liking
#EmbraceYourSpace’s page here and
sharing posts that you find striking.
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IMPRINT presents
“I wanna burn this place down!”!
Mad Men & the History of late 20th Century Feminism
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!
join professor Elizabeth
Wallace & the Women’s
Center in a discussion
about Female roles in
Mad Men
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When? Thursday, April 23rd at 12:30PM
Where? The Women’s Center (McElroy 141)
Questions? Email women@bc.edu
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Pizza will be provided
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